Ilhan Omar's GOP challenger blasts Twitter after account suspended over 'treason' tweet

A Republican challenging U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., in 2020 blasted Twitter on Friday after having her accounts permanently suspended this week following a tweet suggesting that the incumbent congresswoman should be hanged if found guilty of treason.
Danielle Stella wrote on her campaign Twitter account Tuesday, “If it is proven @IlhanMN passed sensitive info to Iran, she should be tried for #treason and hanged," The Washington Examiner reported.
She later added a link to a blog post that included a drawing of a stick figure being hanged.
Stella's tweet followed media reports that Omar's name came up in a Canadian businessman's deposition in a Florida court case.
The businessman, Alan Bender, claimed that Qatari officials told him Omar was the "jewel in the crown" of U.S. politicians who allegedly were Qatari assets and shared information with Iran, the Washington Examiner reported.
But several journalists have tweeted that they have found no evidence to support any of Bender's claims about Omar, the Examiner added.
Meanwhile, a Twitter spokesperson said Stella's accounts were closed for “repeated violations of the Twitter rules," The Examiner reported.
“To clarify, I said, "If it is proven ____ passed sensitive info to Iran, she should be tried for #treason and hanged". Treason is the only thing mentioned in the constitution for the death penalty, punishable by hanging or firing squad," Stella wrote in a statement posted on Facebook on Friday. "I believe all involved should be thoroughly investigated. I did not threaten anyone.”
Stella said people were “making this into something it's not. You are making it about race, about religion, about anything but the truth.”
“My suspension for advocating for the enforcement of federal code proves Twitter will always side with and fight to protect terrorists, traitors, pedophiles and rapists,” she told The Examiner.
She added that she’s received death threats over her comments.
Omar tweeted in response, “This is the natural result of a political environment where anti-Muslim dogwhistles and dehumanization are normalized by an entire political party and its media outlets. Violent rhetoric inevitably leads to violent threats, and ultimately, violent acts.”
Stella’s website describes her as a special-education-needs professional who has dedicated her life to “teaching, supporting, and caring for children with Autism.”
Stella also claism she is a strong supporter of President Trump and free speech.

Tech giants promise $3B to help solve nation’s housing crisis

A couple takes in the view of the San Francisco, California skyline. (Reuters Photo/Robert Galbraith)

Tamara Mitchell, a volunteer for the Coalition on Homelessness, said it’s becoming impossible to live in San Francisco as the country’s housing crisis is only getting worse. Major cities in the Bay Area, including San Francisco, have the third largest population of people experiencing homelessness.

“We’ve been homeless, we’ve been staying in hotels, we’ve been staying with family members – it’s been a lot,” she explained.
However, help may soon be on the way. That’s because companies such as Apple, Facebook, Google and Microsoft have promised to pay more than $3 billion to help solve the problem. This comes as many blame the housing crisis, in part, on Big Tech for building companies like the ones in Silicon Valley without considering where their employees would live with factors like strict house zoning laws and the possibility of prices skyrocketing.
This comes at the heels of a bipartisan initiative in Congress called the Affordable Housing Credit Improvement Act, which would give incentives to purchase homes by setting a locked-in tax credit rate. The bill would also create more housing units, which would hopefully drive down prices.
So far, a large number of house legislators and U.S. senators from both parties have backed the bill. Lawmakers say the legislation would also make the country’s housing credit more effective for veterans, rural residents and Native American communities.

 

FILE – A man stands outside his tent on Division Street in San Francisco. (AP Photo/Eric Risberg, File)

Business leaders say it’s about time Big Tech owns up to its role in causing the housing crisis and that Congress also finally takes action to remedy the issue.
“As long as I’ve lived here, and that’s 30 years, people have said, ‘oh the housing is just out of control, it’s no longer connected to reality, this can’t continue’ and yet here we are,” said Russell Hancock, president and CEO Joint Ventures. “What’s happening most recently though is now we’re referring to it as a crisis.”
Hancock suggested that the most marginalized communities will continue to be hit the hardest by the housing crisis if action isn’t taken soon by Congress, Big Tech or both.

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The Latest: Trump, in Afghanistan, says Taliban wants deal

BAGRAM AIR FIELD, Afghanistan (AP) — The Latest on President Donald Trump’s first visit to Afghanistan (all times local):

12:20 a.m.

President Donald Trump is returning to the U.S. after an unannounced trip to Afghanistan, his first visit to the site of America’s longest war.

Trump took off after midnight from Bagram Air Field after several hours with the troops and a brief meeting with Afghan President Ashraf Ghani.

Trump says the U.S. and Taliban have been engaged in ongoing peace talks and he thinks the Taliban want to make a deal.

Trump abruptly broke off peace talks with the Taliban in September, canceling a secret meeting with at Camp David after a bombing in Kabul that killed 12 people, including an American soldier. It was not immediately clear how long or substantive the U.S. reengagement with the Taliban has been.

White House spokesman Judd Deere said Ghani was notified of the president’s visit a few hours before Trump’s arrival and accepted an invitation to meet at the base.

___

11:50 p.m.

President Donald Trump is thanking U.S. troops in Afghanistan during a surprise visit to Bagram Air Field in his first trip to the site of America’s longest war.

He says he flew 8,331 miles to be there to tell them the U.S. has never been stronger. He says, “There is nowhere I’d rather celebrate Thanksgiving.”

Trump spoke to a crowd of about 1,500 troops gathered in a hangar on the base. He stood behind a podium surrounded by army green sandbags and flanked by military equipment.

Trump at one point invited Afghan President Ashraf Ghani to join him onstage. Ghani wished the troops a “Happy Thanksgiving” and commended Trump for his leadership.

Tens of thousands of Afghan civilians and more than 2,400 American service members have been killed since America’s longest war began 18 years ago.

___

11:40 p.m.

President Donald Trump had a Thanksgiving meal with U.S. troops at Bagram Air Field in Afghanistan, where he traveled secretly Thursday.

Trump’s first stop was a dining hall decked out in paper Thanksgiving decorations where he plated turkey for the troops at the largest U.S. base in the country.

He was then greeted by a round of loud cheers as he headed into a main dining area and sat down for a meal, chatted and posed for photos.

He also thanked the troops and joked that, “It’s a long flight, but we love it.”

The meal included turkey, ham, macaroni and cheese, mashed potatoes and candied yams. The Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade, Entertainment Tonight and a Harry Potter movie played on dining hall TVs.

___

11:30 p.m.

President Donald Trump is making a surprise visit to Afghanistan to spend time with U.S. troops on Thanksgiving.

Trump arrived at Bagram Air Field shortly after 8:30 p.m. local time and spent more than two-and-a-half hours on the ground. Reporters were under strict instructions to keep the trip a secret to ensure his safety.

The visit comes more than two months after Trump abruptly broke off peace talks with the Taliban after a bombing in Kabul killed 12 people, including an American soldier.

And it comes at a pivotal moment in Trump’s presidency, with the impeachment inquiry moving quickly.

The president and first lady made a similar trip last year to Iraq on Christmas night — their first to an active conflict zone.

Vice President Mike Pence also visited troops in Iraq this week.

___

11 p.m.

The White House went to great lengths to keep the president’s surprise Thanksgiving trip to Afghanistan secret after his cover was blown last year.

Cell phones were confiscated from everyone traveling aboard Air Force One to Bagram Air Field. And Thanksgiving-themed tweets were teed up to publish ahead of time from the president’s account to prevent suspicions arising about his silence.

The president first flew back to the Washington area secretly from Florida, where reporters had been told he’d be spending Thanksgiving.

Meanwhile, the plane he’d flown to Florida remained parked on the tarmac at West Palm Beach Airport to avoid revealing the president’s movement.

Last year, Air Force One was spotted en route to Iraq by an amateur British flight watcher.

Trump impeachment drive has parallels to Wisconsin recall

MADISON, Wis. (AP) — A divisive leader drove the opposition to extreme measures. The political climate was toxic — with little civil debate or middle ground. The clash ended in a high-risk political showdown that captured the nation’s attention and shaped the next election.

This was the 2012 battle to recall Republican Gov. Scott Walker, not the 2019 fight to impeach President Donald Trump. But for some who lived through the former, the episodes have clear similarities and a warning for Democrats about overreach and distraction.

“In both cases, they thought just as they were upset about something, everyone was,” Walker said, describing one of his takeaways from the campaign that failed to remove him from office. “Just because your base feels strongly about something doesn’t mean that the majority of other voters do.”

Although moderates declined to join liberals back then in voting to eject Walker, Democrats warn against presuming they’ll break the same way for Trump next year in Wisconsin, a state seen as pivotal in 2020. Voters who were likely wary of undoing Walker’s election via a rare recall face a simpler choice in whether to hand Trump a second term, they say.

“People may not like impeachment, simply because it adds to the drama of his presidency, but that doesn’t mean they are on the fence or sympathetic to Trump,” said Jon Erpenbach, a Democratic Wisconsin state senator.

The Walker recall sprang from a law he signed just months into his first term that effectively ended collective bargaining for most public employees. Walker didn’t reveal his plan until after he was elected in 2010, and the move sparked massive protests that made Wisconsin the center of a growing national fight over union rights.

Angry activists gathered nearly a million signatures to force the recall. Although Democrats had fought hard against the bill, with some state senators even fleeing the state at one point to avoid a vote, they were initially reluctant to embrace the recall for fear it would hurt then-President Barack Obama’s reelection hopes in 2012.

The recall became a proxy battle ahead of the presidential election, with Democrats arguing that Walker unfairly targeted teachers, nurses and other public employees to weaken the unions that traditionally supported Democratic candidates. Walker argued that his proposal shouldn’t have been a surprise since he campaigned on forcing public employees to pay more for their benefits while capping how much they could bargain for in raises. He also argued that it wasn’t proper to use the extraordinary option of recall over a policy dispute.

Walker ultimately won the recall election in June 2012, becoming a conservative hero on his way to a short-lived run for president in 2015. In a testament to Wisconsin’s political division, just five months after Walker won the recall vote, Obama cruised to victory in Wisconsin on his way to reelection.

Trump is accused of improperly withholding U.S. military aid that Ukraine needed to resist Russian aggression in exchange for Ukraine’s new president investigating Trump political rival Joe Biden and his son. Trump has argued that he was within his rights to ask Ukraine to look into corruption and that impeachment is just an attempt by Democrats to remove him from office.

Both impeachment and attempting to recall governors from office are exceedingly rare. Impeachment has only been leveled by the House against two presidents, Andrew Johnson in 1868 and Bill Clinton 130 years later. Richard Nixon was on the brink of it in 1974 before he resigned. Walker was only the third governor in U.S. history to face a recall election and the first to survive it.

The rarity of the remedy may help explain why voters are reluctant to do either one, said Charles Franklin, who has regularly surveyed voter attitudes in Wisconsin for Marquette University.

A Marquette University Law School poll conducted just as public impeachment hearings were beginning earlier this month showed 53% of voters in Wisconsin were against removing Trump for office, with just 40% in support. National polls have shown a more even divide.

Even more troubling for Wisconsin Democrats was that while 78% of Democrats supported removing Trump through impeachment, 93% of Republicans were against it. That stronger rallying behind the incumbent, with the other side not as unified, parallels what was seen during the Walker recall, Franklin said.

Walker saw his support among independent voters go from about even six months before the recall election to positive 16 points just before the election. The latest Marquette poll also shows independents currently breaking against impeachment, with 47% against and 36% in favor.

Mike Tate, who was chairman of the state Democratic Party during the recall and continues to work in the state as a consultant, cautioned against making too much of where independents are on impeachment — and where they may be next November. After the impeachment process runs its course, Democrats will move on to talk about many other issues throughout the presidential campaign, Tate said.

“Impeachment will be in the rearview mirror,” he said.

But Stephan Thompson, who led the state GOP during the recalls and went on to manage Walker’s successful 2014 reelection campaign, said impeachment is “such a monumental event in history and politics” that it will hang over Democrats the rest of the cycle and make it difficult for them to bring moderate voters back to their side.

“When the left pushes this hard and overreaches, it helps you band together with people because you’re all in the foxhole together,” Thompson said. “I think that’s something they don’t realize.”

Erpenbach, the state senator, was among those who fled to Illinois for two weeks to try to kill the anti-union bill. He argues that unlike the recall, which was motivated by a policy disagreement, Congress was forced to hold impeachment hearings because Trump is alleged to have violated the Constitution.

Democrats are taking a political chance, Erpenbach said, but they’re doing what the Constitution requires, a key distinction from the recall.

“It worries me that it could backfire,” Erpenbach said, “but that’s not the point.”

___

Follow Scott Bauer on Twitter: https://twitter.com/sbauerAP

New York Times columnist’s Republican brother pens column blasting 2020 Dems, praising Trump

And you thought there was tension at your Thanksgiving table.
Once a year, Maureen Dowd, the Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist at the New York Times, allows her Republican brother Kevin Dowd to take over her column and opine about anything that he sees as a matter of importance. This year, he laid out his argument for President Trump's second term and what he sees as a flawed Democratic field.
To say his sister is no fan of Trump could be an understatement. Some of her most recent columns were titled, “Impeaching the Peach One,” “Blowhard on the Brink” and “A Down and Dirty White House."
But her brother seems to see things differently. He began his column by pointing out that readers have asked his sister how it is possible that he can still support the president. He responded, "Have you looked at the alternative?"
Kevin Dowd praised Trump over his handling of Iran and North Korea and pointed to economic gains seen during his presidency. He praised Trump for supporting law enforcement and criticized 2020 candidates – Michael Bloomberg in particular—for “apologizing” for reducing crimes in big cities. Bloomberg has apologized for employing stop-and-frisk during his tenure as the mayor of New York City and then defended the practice after he left office.
He said Trump may be a bully at times, but overall he’s been "pleasantly surprised that he has done exactly what he promised despite a hostile press." He went on to criticize the media over its attempt to "valorize" bureaucrats taking part in the impeachment inquiry armed with second and third-hand information. He said, “if these people were that conflicted, they should have quit.”
He called the inquiry into the allegation that Trump withheld military funding from Ukraine in an attempted quid pro quo a “farce,” and said he thinks all "aid is a quid pro quo."
"The Democrats have never recovered from the 2016 election when they nominated the worst candidate in political history and lost to a political novice," he wrote.
Maureen Dowd wrote something of a disclaimer at the beginning of the column and it appears her brother is not the only GOP supporter in the family. She wrote that her sister admires Rep. Jim Jordan.
"My sister thinks Jim Jordan is hot," she wrote. "Well, she didn't say "hot" exactly, but the words "admire," “forceful,” and fighter have been thrown around.”

Beijing threats over bill supporting Hong Kong ’laughable,’ China expert says

Gordon Chang, the author of "The Coming Collapse of China," said Thursday that Beijing’s threats of taking "countermeasures" over the U.S. law backing the protests in Hong Kong are “laughable” and is in no position to "anger its best customer" as its economy slumps.
Beijing was quick to admonish President Trump and Congress for passing two bills aimed at supporting human rights in Hong Kong.  The Chinese foreign ministry said in a statement that the bills will only "strengthen the resolve of the Chinese people, including the Hong Kong people, and raise the sinister intentions and hegemonic nature of the U.S," and promised  vague "countermeasures."
Chang said in an email that anything Beijing can do "will hurt itself more than us, and given how close its economy is to the edge of the cliff the regime could end up doing itself in by retaliating."
He continued, "For four decades, we were told by elites and policymakers that we could not afford to upset China. Wednesday, President Trump did what his predecessors would not do—defend America from a China that is going after us. The same power that is encroaching on Hong Kong’s autonomy is attacking our society across the board."
Hong Kong, a former British colony that was granted semi-autonomy when China took control in 1997, has been rocked by six months of sometimes violent pro-democracy demonstrations after an extradition bill surfaced last summer that-- if passed-- would have sent alleged criminals in Hong Kong to China for trial.
The Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act, which was sponsored by Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., requires that the U.S. conducts yearly reviews into Hong Kong’s autonomy from Beijing. If ever found unsatisfactory, the city's special status for U.S. trading could be tossed.
Up until Wednesday's announcement, Trump did not indicate whether or not he would sign the bill. Secretary of  State Mike Pompeo refused to answer a reporter's question about the president's leanings as recent as Tuesday.
"I signed these bills out of respect for President Xi, China, and the people of Hong Kong," Trump said in a statement. "They are being enacted in the hope that Leaders and Representatives of China and Hong Kong will be able to amicably settle their differences leading to long term peace and prosperity for all."
The Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act, which was sponsored by Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., requires that the U.S. conducts yearly reviews into Hong Kong’s autonomy from Beijing. If ever found unsatisfactory, the city's special status for U.S. trading could be tossed.
The bills were applauded by protesters who see them as a warning to Beijing and Hong Kong.
"In any event, let the Chinese huff and puff over the bills President Trump signed," Chang wrote. "Wednesday was a great day for America, and a great day for free societies across the world."

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